Economic Warfare: A “Trusted” Tool of the British Empire

The economic warfare against Russia unleashed in the past weeks has been on the agenda since well before the current “Ukraine” crisis, as was confirmed by “unnamed” White House officials on Jan. 25 (cf.SAS 5/22). Their statement confirmed President Putin’s firm belief that Russia would be subjected to harsh sanctions no matter what course he took in dealing with Ukraine.

But while various Americans are arrogantly engaging in self-congratulations over the damage done and while U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan warned Chinese official Yang Jiechi at a March 14 meeting in Rome that China would face similarly harsh sanctions if they aid Russia, one must not overlook the British role in confronting both Russia and China. After all, the British Empire has engaged in economic warfare for centuries, going back at least to the neoliberal Malthusians of the British East India Company, and the role they played in the deaths of between one and two million Irish in the Potato Famine between 1845 and 1852, and the waves of famines which swept India in the 18th through the 20th century, with deaths in the tens of millions.

The tools employed may be different, but the intent is the same: to contain the potential threat posed by sovereign nation states to the deadly looting operations run by the financial oligarchy in the City of London. And while the UK today lacks the power to unilaterally run the post-Cold War order, the United States serves as the leading military enforcer of the new empire, operating under the direction of trans-Atlantic banking, insurance and other interlocking corporate cartels.

The ugly face of this new Malthusian policy is Foreign Secretary Liz Truss. At a March 10 address at the Atlantic Council, an Anglo-American think tank funded by corporate cartels, she outlined how the current war against Russia can be used to craft a new imperial global security architecture and economic structure. She called the crisis in Ukraine “a paradigm shift on the scale of 9/11, and how we respond today will set the pattern for this new era”. We simply cannot allow “Putin’s expansionism” to go unchallenged, she said, adding that we “are still not doing enough”. “We want a situation where they [the Russians] can’t access their funds, they can’t clear their payments, their trade can’t flow, their ships can’t dock, and their planes can’t land…. And we must do more to deliver defensive weapons…. We will do all of this and we will shape this new global era for global security.”

Just one day before that, the Atlantic Council’s sanctions guru, Daniel Fried, had co-authored a piece titled “What’s Left to Sanction in Russia? Wallets, Stocks, and Foreign Investments.” Fried, who drafted the original sanctions against Russia related to the 2014 coup for the Obama Administration, concludes that removing or suspending sanctions after the war’s end would be “complex”, since Putin’s promises “simply can’t be trusted”.